April 24, 2005 - The Heritage Center in Cobh.

We were surprised at breakfast by a telephone call from Eileen, an old acquaintance of Lois, and shortly afterwards she joined us for the morning. Eileen had been born in Kinsale and told us many interesting tidbits about the town as we wandered around looking for a place to have a spot of tea. We saw where the water had come up the hill during a great flood and a house where her father had saved a little girl from a fire. She even knew which houses were original and which had been replaced during the town's renovation into a modern day resort area.

We enjoyed seeing the house of the "Kinsale Giant", a man 8 feet 3 inches tall who lived in an itty-bitty house just off the lower end of Chairman Street. We all agreed that the ceilings of the little blue house were so low he could probably never stand up straight in his own house! We saw his (huge) shoes in the town museum, but I didn't find out if he ever married or had children. Chairman Street, by the way, was named for the men using sedan chairs as taxis to carry the wealthier folks from the dockside up into the town center. Eileen commented that in the old days the town was mostly a dingy gray, but it had been "tarted up" as she put it with new paint and renovated or restored buildings during the last 30 years. All in all, Eileen gave us a completely different view on Kinsale, that of a young girl growing up in the town before it ever became a popular resort.

Although Patsy's Corner Café was closed that morning, we finally went to Gina's Café for our tea, where we chatted amiably about our families and Eileen's work as a drama and voice coach until well after noon. But finally we had to start our day's drive, the first leg of which was north to the town of Cobh (pronounced "Cove"), the port area for the city of Cork. Our goal was to visit the Cobh Heritage Center and find out more about the emigration from Ireland that had mostly transpired through that port.

The Heritage Center was housed in one end of a circa 1900 Victorian-style train station. The other end of the station still apparently functioned as a rail terminus for passenger trains, as far as I could tell.

The museum exhibits were called the "Queenstown Experience" as Cobh was renamed Queenstown after a visit by Queen Victoria in the mid-1800s. The exhibits detailed the flow of emigration through the port over the decades from 1800 to 1950 or so. Prior to 1845, the major emigration had been transportation of Irish prisoners to the penal colonies in Australia. The initial prisoner transports were crowded with prisoners in ways that reminded me of how Africans were packed into slave ships, and the casualty rates were similarly quite high. Although the casualties drew at first no more than a "slap on the wrist" type of penalty, the English government ultimately recognized the problem and took steps to reduce the death rate to about 1% of the prisoners.

In many ways the complete failure of the potato crop in the year 1845 and for several years thereafter seems to have been one of the defining events in Irish history. The resulting famine, starvation, and migration out of the country were of an almost unimaginable magnitude. The overall population, for example, declined in those years from around 6 million to 4.4 million, a decrease of 25%. But in certain rural areas it was much worse. On Dingle Peninsula the population had decreased by 90% and on the Iveragh Peninsula by 75%, accounting for the plethora of abandoned homes and churches that were still visible as we drove thru150 years later.

The choice of starving or leaving forced an increase in emigration from about 30,000+ in 1844 before the famine to 280,000 or so in 1845 and for many years thereafter. Most of that wave of emigration was to the U.S. or Canada. In fact, so many people pressed onto so many ill-equipped and poorly run ships to make that desperate voyage that the ships were called "coffin ships" because of the death rate. But other parts of the exhibit also documented the rise of the great ocean liners in the late 1800s and the much better accommodations on them for subsequent waves of emigrants. Emigration continued for over a hundred years but finally tailed off in the 20th Century when improving economic conditions in Ireland in the 1970s gave sufficient opportunities to keep the young folk in the country.

That was all interesting, but I didn't have much luck with tracking down my great grandmother's emigration. The kiosk for genealogical information was not staffed when we visited and the lady selling tickets to the Queenstown exhibit said that the information given was general in nature, whereas I really wanted to know what ship they had taken and where they had landed in the U.S. or Canada, and specifics like that. So instead she gave me some copies of lists of websites that I could explore to try to track down my ancestors' emigration, for which I was grateful.

After lunch at the museum café located right there in the train station, we continued driving to Waterford. The countryside now became the gently rolling agricultural countryside that we had all imagined to typify Ireland. It was less spectacular than the mountains of the peninsulas or the coastline cliffs we had seen, but very pretty in its own right. The roads were broad, well marked, and smoothly paved so driving was easy and we made it to Waterford by 5 p.m.

What was surprisingly difficult was finding a place to stay for the night. In fact, we had to visit 4 B&Bs on the south side of Waterford before finding one that had someone at home, and that was very puzzling indeed. I was not sure if some of these places had kind of closed up shop until the tourist season really began, whether everyone was out at a Sunday evening mass, or whether we were just supremely unlucky that night.

We did find a place on our 4th try, however, and the luck balanced out when we went to eat at the pub just down the road with the unlikely name of the Holy Cross Bar. I kid you not. Does that not strike you as an odd label for a bar? What next, Holy Ghost Slot Machines? Papal Bull Burgers? I guess coming from the U.S. I was just not used to the juxtaposition of sacred and secular that I sometimes found in Ireland.

But the main thing beside the usual good bar grub was that we found a local music group playing Irish folk songs, ballads, and such like. Lois had been pining for an authentic pub experience complete with Irish music, so finally she got it. I would have loved a sing-along, which I understand some pubs have on occasion, but I certainly enjoyed just hearing these professionals play and sing.

We stayed until dusk and returned to the B&B for the shank end of the evening. Lois and Monika read the women's magazines with which our room was well stocked, for some reason. I preferred to work on the journal because first of all it needed to be done and secondly I really could not care less about the royal weddings and suchlike that those magazines were filled with. However, they also had crossword puzzles, so we did not have to exhaust Lois' stash of U.S. crosswords to keep busy the rest of the evening. But we also found out through bitter experience that the Irish crosswords were more difficult than typical U.S. puzzles. I suppose that this is partly due to the different ways English is used in Ireland vs. the U.S. In any event, I don't think we ever completed on of the Irish ones.